On Wed, 2006-08-23 at 08:23 -0600, an unknown sender wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 07:37:59AM -0600, jeff wrote:
> > I had problems installing some newer distros on my laptop. Fedora Core
> > 5 Froze durring install. CentOS 4.3 finished installing, but would not
> > boot. Gentoo's default kernel had frame buffer issues with my video
> > card. The laptop is a dog, and I didn't have a couple of days for stuff
> > to compile, so I ended up reverting to Core 4 on it.
> >
> > It seems like older systems are getting more difficult to get working
> > these days. When I do have the time... Gentoo is going back on it.
> > Fedora is just too slow on it.
>> You might try just compiling a custom vanilla kernel for it. That more
> than anything would give a performance increase, then you could turn off
> needless services like RAID and postfix, etc.
Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, compiling vanilla kernels is a
bad idea on fedora. It just won't work well with Fedora's hardware
detection, configuration, and hotplugging stuff.
I also challenge the idea that a vanilla kernel is going to be any
faster than the Fedora stock kernel. Fedora ships with tons of driver
support, but by and large that is in modules and not in the main kernel
unless you use it. Even unused subsystems in the kernel are not going
to make that much of a difference.
If you do need custom features in fedora, the recommended procedure is
to build your own kernel rpm from Fedora sources, adding in the patches
and so forth you need. This has its own set of issues though. In my 8
years of using Linux as my primary system, I stopped compiling my own
kernels about 6 years ago, generally. The exception to this was when I
wanted to play around with Beagle and needed the new notify stuff. I
added the patch into the kernel source rpm and rebuild it that way
(takes a long time since kernel rpms build for 3 architectures usually
-- 586, 686, 686smp). But the beagle thing required more dependencies
than I wanted to deal with, so I put that off until we had stock kernels
with the notify stuff in it.
Michael
>>> Justin
>> /*
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